Nick Mudge Ignition Software Consulting & Development

Charles Petzold wrote the book CODE The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software which I read and think is very informative.

I find his post about Visual Studio interesting: Does Visual Studio Rot the Mind?

From the post:

Visual Studio can be one of the programmer's best friends, but over the years it has become increasingly pushy, domineering, and suffering from unsettling control issues. Should we just surrender to Visual Studio's insistence on writing our code for us? Or is Visual Studio sapping our programming intelligence rather than augmenting it? This talk dissects the code generated by Visual Studio; analyzes the appalling programming practices it perpetuates; rhapsodizes about the joys, frustrations, and satisfactions of unassisted coding; and speculates about the radical changes that Avalon will bring.

Andrew Gwozdziewycz wrote a post about PHP 5.3's new feature that allows closures in PHP for the first time and goes on to explain it and how to use it.

I think this is really exciting for PHP programmers who have wished a more functional life. (Like me.)

Andrew also wrote a library that uses the new closures functionality to create a lot of common higher order functions and functionality. From his post:

Fn.php is an attempt to define lots of useful higher-order functions to PHP, and fix some of the things that are inconsistent with the others. Fn.php already supports the things in PHP that already exist, but adds foldr, compose, zip, andf, orf, not, any, every, curry, I, K, S, flip and a new short hand way to define functions with strings.

I just watched a very interesting interview of Marc Andreessen on Charlie Rose. Marc Andreeson is one of my favorite technology people. I was lucky to meet him and have a short conversation with him at Startup School last year.

A couple things I didn't know:
The Mosaic web browser was developed at University of Illinois by Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina in 1993. Marc left the University and went on to create Netscape Navigator (which eventually became Firefox). What I didn't know is that Microsoft ended up buying the Mosaic code for $2 million and renaming it Internet Explorer. So Marc actually originally wrote both browsers.

Evan Williams is the guy who started blogger.com, but did you know he also started twitter.com?

I wrote a small PHP caching system and I'm releasing it here under a BSD open source license.

SimpleCache is a file-based caching system that is used to cache dynamically generated content, as from a database and/or heavy processing. It's use is similar to the caching system that is part of the PHP Smarty templating system (except Smarty caches HTML output, whereas SimpleCache caches whatever kind of data you want to cache).

SimpleCache is very flexible in that you can cache as finely grained as you want, you can cache whatever data you want, is very easy to install (simply include one file into your PHP files) and is easy to insert into your code. It requires PHP 5.

It does not cache compiled intermediate PHP code, like Alternative PHP Cache does. It does not cache data to memory, only to files.

SimpleCache is here. Instructions on how to use it are in that file.